TY - BOOK ID - 77900588 TI - Classical Arabic biography : the heirs of the prophets in the age of al-Mamun PY - 2000 SN - 1107118352 0521088542 0511150555 0511118120 0511310242 0511048858 0511497466 1280162341 0511008236 9780511008238 0511033613 9780511033612 9780511048852 9780511118128 9780521661997 0521661994 9780511497469 9780521088541 PB - Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Literature and history KW - History and literature KW - History and poetry KW - Poetry and history KW - History KW - Islamic Empire KW - Arab countries KW - Arab Empire KW - Empire, Islamic KW - Middle East KW - Muslim Empire KW - Historiography. KW - History and criticism. KW - Biography KW - Biography as a literary form KW - Islamic literature, Arabic KW - Islam KW - Biographie (Genre littéraire) KW - Littérature islamique arabe KW - History and criticism KW - Historiography KW - Histoire et critique KW - Historiographie KW - Arts and Humanities UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77900588 AB - Pre-modern Arabic biography has served as a major source for the history of Islamic civilization. In this 2000 study exploring the origins and development of classical Arabic biography, Michael Cooperson demonstrates how Muslim scholars used the notions of heirship and transmission to document the activities of political, scholarly and religious communities. The author also explains how medieval Arab scholars used biography to tell the life-stories of important historical figures by examining the careers of the Abbasid Caliph al- Ma'mun, the Shiite Imam Ali al-Rida, the Sunni scholar Ahmad Ibn Hanbal and the ascetic Bishr al-Hafi, each of whom represented a tradition of political and spiritual heirship to the Prophet. Drawing on anthropology and comparative religion, as well as history and literary criticism, the book considers how each figure responded to the presence of the others and how these responses were preserved by posterity. ER -